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Reinventing the wheel – without the wheel (March 2017)

Andrew Gilligan) Reinventing the wheel – without the wheel andrewgilliganblogMarch 14, 2017 The Royal Parks’ new scheme to make one of their key cycle routes deliberately worse for cyclists is not just depressing in itself. Even worse is that it is being funded by the Central London Grid, part of the TfL cycle budget. It… [Read More]

The official version of Healthy Streets, published last month, is one where walking, cycling and indeed going by bus are all one united family of virtuous, green travel modes, with no conflicts of interest between them, safely mixing together in a political (and perhaps indeed physical) shared space.

But it isn’t true. Physically, as any user of (say) Exhibition Road in Kensington or Queen Street in the City knows, shared space in busy, built-up streets is a costly failure. It looks pretty on TfL slides, but it works for neither cyclists nor pedestrians. As the pedestrian group Living Streets points out in this recent demolition of the Queen Street scheme, it is particularly bad where there are large numbers of either.

Politically – though many cycling campaigners may feel uncomfortable admitting this – the interests of pedestrians and cyclists are sometimes different (though by no means always, as the common opposition to shared space shows.) The Royal Parks says it is degrading its bike route on Broad Walk specifically to benefit pedestrians, who it declares are its priority users, “even in areas designated and marked for other purposes” (alas, this stirring principle applies only to its cycle routes, and not to its routes designated and marked for motor traffic.) One objection routinely made by opponents of the superhighways was that they were against pedestrians’ interests.